Conference Presentations

Strength in Numbers: Using Web Analytics to Drive Test Requirements
Slideshow

Once a client’s website is built, you’d think it would be time for a well-deserved break. However, almost immediately, questions come up—can we capture a larger audience? close more orders? increase our sales? And so, it’s time to redesign the site—and the test strategy and plans...

Lindiwe Vinson, Organic, Inc.
Estimating in Software Development: No Silver Bullets Allowed
Slideshow

What do poker, Greek oracles, an Italian mathematician from the Middle Ages, and the path of hurricanes have in common? Given the title of this presentation, chances are it has something to do with estimation, and you'll have to attend this session to get the full connection. Kent McDonald explores the challenges and realities of trying to estimate software-related knowledge work-analysis, testing, development, and the entire project effort. A major challenge is that there are no guaranteed ways to arrive at perfectly accurate estimates, which not surprisingly is why they are called estimates. Kent introduces and gives you a chance to practice quick and practical estimating techniques that will work in different situations-guesstimating, break it down and add it up, and planning poker.

Kent McDonald, Knowledge Bridge Partners
Risk Analysis for Test Managers

Risks are endemic in every step of every software project. A well-established key to project success is to proactively identify, understand, and mitigate these risks. However, risk management is not the sole domain of the project manager, particularly with regard to product quality where test managers and testers can significantly influence the project outcome. Julie Gardiner demonstrates how to evaluate and mitigate product risk from a testing perspective. She describes different approaches to risk management, the benefits of each, and how to use them. With an understanding and appreciation for product risk analysis, the test manager and team can then assess which testing approaches and techniques they should apply to reduce these risks. Julie demonstrates an easy way to report on progress to business management and stakeholders using product risk as its basis.

Julie Gardiner, Grove Consultants
Usability Testing in a Nutshell

Because systems are now more complex and competition is extreme, testing for usability is crucial for ensuring our products not only stand out from the crowd but even exceed our customer's expectations. As testers, we often encounter requirements such as "The system must be user-friendly." What does this mean? And, more importantly, how do we test against this vague notion? Join Julie Gardiner as she presents usability testing techniques to help evaluate system efficiency, effectiveness, and user satisfaction. Take back a toolkit full of usability testing techniques-heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthrough, focus groups, personas, contextual task analysis, usability labs, and satisfaction surveys-for your next testing project. Learn how to define usability goals and how to get your development team to take usability issues seriously. If you want to improve your confidence in usability testing, this session is for you.

Julie Gardiner, Grove Consultants
Crowdsourced Testing: An Emerging Business Model

Crowdsourced testing has emerged as a startlingly effective by-product of social networking. Manoj Narayanan describes how many organizations are leveraging crowdsourcing to reduce testing costs and increase product quality. They are learning that the value of crowdsourced testing can differ significantly based on whether you are testing a web application, mobile device, or gaming app. To help you evaluate the benefits and constraints, Manoj compares the business model crowdsourced vendors are adopting to traditional testing approaches. Explore how crowdsourced vendors are now focusing on vertical integration through partnerships with both cloud-based infrastructure services and on-demand testing tool vendors to improve ROI. Manoj concludes by exploring how greater integration between social networking and crowdsourcing can further enhance the testing business model.

Manoj Narayanan, Cognizant Technology Solutions
Exploratory Validation: What We Can Learn from Testing Investment Models

Over the past few years, the airwaves have been flooded with commercials for investment-support software. Do your research with us, they promise, and you can make scads of money in the stock market. How could we test such a product? These products provide several capabilities. For example, they estimate the value or direction of change of individual stocks or the market as a whole, and they suggest trading strategies that tell you whether to buy, hold, or sell. Every valuation rule and every strategy is a feature. We can test the implementation of these features, but the greater risks lie in the accuracy of the underlying models. If you execute the wrong trades perfectly, you will lose money. That's not a useful feature, no matter how well implemented.

Cem Kaner, Florida Institute of Technology
Risk Identification, Analysis, and Mitigation in Agile Environments

Although risk identification, analysis, and mitigation are critically important parts of any software project effort, agile projects require non-traditional techniques that are much quicker and easier to use than classical risk techniques. James McCaffrey focuses-not on theory-but on realistic risk analysis methods agile teams can readily implement with lightweight tools. James explains and demonstrates how you can employ taxonomy and storyboarding methods to recognize project meta-risks and identify product risks throughout the development lifecycle. Using “central moment” and “PERIL” techniques, you'll learn to analyze these risks and develop management and mitigation strategies dynamically, while the project is underway.

James McCaffrey, Volt VTE
Executable Specs w/ FitNesse Selenium

"Executable Specifications with FitNesse and Selenium."

Dawn Cannan, DocSite LLC
STAREAST 2006: All I Need to Know about Testing I Learned from Dr. Seuss

Through the stories and parables of Theodor Geisel, we can learn simple, yet remarkably powerful approaches for solving testing problems. In a tour of common issues we encounter in testing-test planning, staff training, communications, test case design, test execution, status reporting, and more, Robert Sabourin explains how you can apply lessons from the great books of Dr. Seuss to testing. Green Eggs and Ham teaches us combinations; Go, Dog, Go teaches us the value of persistence; Because a Little Bug Went Kachoo teaches us about side effects, chaos, and risk management. Others such as Hop on Pop, Marvin K Mooney, I Can Read with My Eyes Shut, and Inside Outside UpSide Down all have important lessons about how to get things done on software projects. Learn some simple truths and take away some heuristic testing aids to become a more productive and effective tester.

  • Important heuristics to better test planning
Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com Inc
Risk-Based Testing in Practice

The testing community has been talking about risk-based testing for quite a while, and now most projects apply some sort of implicit risk-based testing approach. However, risk-based testing should be more than just brainstorming within the test team; it should be based on business drivers and business value. The Test team is not the risk owner-the products' stakeholders are. It is our job to inform the stakeholders about risk-based decisions and provide visibility on product risk status. Erik discusses a real-world method for applying structured risk-based testing applicable in most software projects. He describes how risk identification and analysis can be carried out in close cooperation with stakeholders Join Erik to learn how the outcome of the risk analysis can-and should-be used in test projects in terms of differentiated test approaches.

Erik van Veenendaal, Improve Quality Services BV

Pages

CMCrossroads is a TechWell community.

Through conferences, training, consulting, and online resources, TechWell helps you develop and deliver great software every day.